FEATURES / CONTAINS

CAUTIONS

TAGS

TARGET AUDIENCE

Adult

PERFORMANCE GROUP

Professional Theatre, Blackbox / Second Stage /Fringe Groups

RECOGNITION / AWARDS

From Broadway

Nominee! 1985 Tony Award for Best Play

This riveting drama took New York by storm in a production directed by Mike Nichols and starring William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Judith Ivey, Christopher Walken, Harvey Keitel, Cynthia Nixon, and Jerry Stiller. Characters nose-deep in the decadent, perverted, cocaine culture that is Hollywood, pursuing a sex-crazed, drug-addled vision of the American Dream. Later stage and screen incarnations have attracted such actors as Ethan Hawke, Meg Ryan, Sean Penn, and Kevin Spacey.

REVIEWS

"Offers some of Mr. Rabe's most inventive and disturbing writing. At his impressive best, Mr. Rabe makes grim, ribald, and surprisingly compassionate comedy out of the lies and rationalizations that allow his alienated men to keep functioning if not feeling in the fogs of Lotusland. They work in an industry so corrupt that its only honest executives are those who openly admit that they lie." - The New York Times

"An important work, masterfully accomplished." - Time

"A powerful permanent contribution to American drama... Riveting, disturbing, fearsomely funny... Has a savage sincerity and a crackling theatrical vitality. This deeply felt play deserves as wide an audience as possible." - Newsweek

Hurlyburly premiered at the Goodman Theatre in April 1984 under the direction of Mike Nichols.